November 19, 2004

How to Take Advantage Of VoIP And The Growing Grey Route Market?

What is a telephony white route?

The route provided by an International Long-Distance telephone operator for legitimately routing traffic into countries for termination.

What is a telephony grey route?

Effectively, a telephone route using VoIP into a market where termination is regulated by Government and lobbied by Telecom monopolies, however, the grey route provider by-passes the telco ILD relationship by carrying the traffic over IP to the local Public Switch Telephone Network. (PSTN) The grey route is predictably cheaper and several North American telco’s send billions of minutes into grey routes to make more money from the difference between the white route quote and a grey route. The most popular grey routes are mobile phone grey routes as the mobile phone is the largest market and most highly over priced in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. International long-distance (ILD) telephone operators have raised alarm in countries like India at the way grey market has snatched away 50% of the calls that should have legitimately been routed through them. Grey route traffic into India for example is in the 3.5 billion minute range or an opportunity of $140 to $280 Million USD business per month profit. A quick explanation of the effect of a grey route in India and the opportunity at hand is “When a call is made from an overseas destination, the legal operator pays Rs 5.50 as termination charges to the domestic basic operator. The illegal operator passes off the incoming traffic as a local call and incurs a cost of 0.50 paise as he skips termination charges. This also means that the revenue margins shift from the local operator to the overseas operator, who pays 7-8 cents against 13 cents through the legal route.

Where is there a business opportunity to create a route?

Most commonly the grey route works through call centers, which are used as front or an extension of an actual call centers revenue stream to skip the ILD operator and are used to route traffic from foreign destinations via VoIP SoftSwitch systems that also act as soft switches for routing traffic. VoIP is 100% legal from computer to computer or IP based application to IP based Application such as two PBX’s. Even Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use their leased lines to terminate international calls. Licenses are not allowed to terminate on fixed lines but it happens.

How do you make a grey route for your Country or Business Model?

Most likely if your country is regulated, the model of disguising the termination point as a call center is the best bet. In addition, setting-up a server for IP telephony such as the Gateway, Soft Switch solution is not illegal PC-to-PC and most likely would not be targeted for the PC-to-Phone termination. The main system can act as the command center for several VoIP enabled PBX Softswitches set-up in houses and call centers nationally thus allowing for an immediate off premise grey routes. For the most part, this would enable you to also compete with the aggregators buying -up the grey route termination minutes.

Risks

It is when a company terminates large volumes of minutes that takes away from the ILD that regulators become more aggressive. The other common incidents are produced when offering a service to the domestic market that involves any type of phone-to-phone service. Trying to copy a Vonage business model in a developing country… expect immediate backlash from the incumbent telecommunications firm to attempt to shutdown your business.

Then who is the client? (Take Advantage of VoIP In Your Country Below!)

I am very much interested in setting up a VOIP phone card business in Nigeria for calling international (and local) destinations. I would greatly appreciate some information on what I need to put in place (and things I need to do) in order to kick-start this business.

very interesting article that you have put together. i was interesting in setting up a route for romania. my questions are: how would the setup be done? what would the network diagram look like? is it legal for romania? and if it is what would be the proceedures to setup. thanx and look foward to hearing from you.

I am Mr. Walter Ray a staff of Standard Bank South Africa. I am writing following an opportunity in my office that will be of immense benefit to both of us. In my department we discovered an abandoned sum of US$10.347 Million belonging to one of our foreign customer Late Mr. Kurt Kahle from United States of America.

You shall read more about the crash on visiting this site .Who died along with his entire family on Monday 31st July 2000 in a plane crash in Paris. Please visit this site that is one of the evidence the directors brought in other to swallow the money at the end of the day.http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/859479.stm

Since we got information about his death, we have been expecting his next of kin to come over and claim his money because we cannot release it unless somebody applies for it as next of kin or relation to the deceased as indicated in our banking laws but unfortunately we learnt that all his supposed next of kin or relation died alongside with him at the plane crash leaving nobody behind for the claim.

It is therefore upon this discovery that I now decided to make this business proposal to you and release the money to you as the next of kin or relation to the deceased for safety and subsequent disbursement since nobody is coming for it and I don't want this money to go into the bank treasury as unclaimed bill.

The banking law and guideline here stipulates that if such money remained unclaimed after six years, the money will be transferred into the bank treasury as unclaimed fund. I agree that 40% of this money will be for you as a respect to the provision of a foreign account and 60% would be for me Thereafter, I will visit your country for disbursement according to the percentage indicated.

Therefore, to enable the immediate transfer of this fund to your designated bank account, you must apply first to the bank as a relation or next of kin of the deceased with a text of application that I will send to you, so I will like you to send to me the below details immediately you acknowledge the good receipt of this message.
Full Name:
Tel Number:
Fax Number:
Occupation:
Country of Origin:
Age:
Sex:

Upon receipt of your reply, I will send you an email with the text of the application. I will not fail to bring to your notice that this transaction is hitch-free and that you should not entertain any atom of fear as all required arrangements have been made for the transfer.

You should contact me immediately as soon as you receive this letter, with my private Email:- mrwalter_ray@myway.com. Trusting to hear from you immediately.

We have the full solution for ur need, if you like to setup Gatways in your area. Please note that we are ONLY interested on selected Country's NOT ALL, we also have route to the following destination.
Brazil,Bulgaria,Cambodia,Chile,China,Colombia,Costa Rica,Croatia,Cyprus,Ecuador,Egypt,Estonia,Georgia,Guatemala,Guinea,Hong Kong,Hungary,India,Indonesia,Iran,Iraq,Israel,Jamaica,Kazakhstan,Kenya,Kuwait,Latvia,Macedonia,Malaysia,Mali,Malta,MauritiusMexico,Moldova,Morocco,Mozambique,Nepal,Nicaragua,Nigeria,Pakistan,Panama,Peru,Poland,Qatar,Romania,Russia,Saudi Arabia,Senegal,Singapore,Slovenia, South Africa,South Korea,Sri Lanka,Suriname,Tajikistan,Thailand,Tunisia,Turkey,Ukraine,Vietnam,Yugoslavia,